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What are the Pros and Cons of a Convention of States?
So, it seems we are toast.
This was Ricochet’s overwhelming verdict. The United States is doomed. I admit I took this a bit badly. (I’d always thought it must just be me. I figured a brisk walk, some sunshine, and a stiff drink would set me right. Apparently not.)
There was, however, one response that got my attention. HVTs suggested something I’d never once considered: Using Article V of the Constitution to call a Convention of States:
…. there is a viable way that can turn our ship of state out of the the shoal waters it’s presently navigating.
Fortunately, the Founders foresaw the possibility (some felt it was a likelihood) that concentrating power in a Federal government ran the risk of it becoming a source of oppression every bit as onerous as George III. They left us with a solution as big as the problem: Article V.
Article V, which spells out how to propose and ratify Constitutional amendments, ensures that the States have the means to amend the Constitution without any interference from Washington’s despotic, out-of-control political class. The solution, then, resides with us.
We have all the Constitutional levers we need. We have to stop snivelling, get engaged, stay engaged and demand our State legislators seek the remedies we need through Article V of the Constitution.
Have a look at the website and tell me what you think. I thought it was an interesting idea.
What do you think: Is it worth a shot?
Published in General
I don’t understand this at all. The only “what are you going to do about it?” issue I can think of is amnesty, and I think it’s clear that an anti-amnesty amendment would not pass.
Other than that, what specific actions might Congress or the President take that would be made less likely by a convention?
Obviously.
The convention will be shaped and guided by state legislators. In other words politicians who campaign door-to-door rather than rely on professional consultants and large media buys funded by unions and The Chamber of Commerce.
And this isn’t a magic fix for limited government. it is a chance to re-establish the balance between the individual states and the Federal Government. Some states will press on the march of socialism, others won’t.
The states control the process. Not the federal government. You don’t think the states want to curb illegal immigration? Especially knowing there is no way the federal government is ever going to fix the problem that they intentionally caused. The big push right now is on a balanced budget amendment, and it’s gaining traction in the states as we speak.
Is your point that “the states” is different to “the political class”? I suspect that the people who would actually be doing this on behalf of the states (since we live in a representative, rather than direct, democracy) are precisely the people that Fred means.
I don’t think that George Mason had any particular set of circumstances in mind beyond a need to amend the Constitution; the reasons for doing that have been diverse, and I believe were anticipated to be so. We’ve expanded and contracted federal power by amendment, engaged in administrative fixes, overturned court decisions, and repealed amendments. Since I think the Constitution works just fine, I’d say that this isn’t the sort of set of circumstances Mason anticipated (he was thinking of times when the Constitution was deficient in some way), but if there is a change to be made then any time seems as good as any other.
I think that there is a diversity of opinion on the subject of immigration, but that we got 25 states to sue Obama over the amnesty. It seems likely, thus, that we would get fewer than 25 states to pass an Amendment. Even if we got more, that still wouldn’t be enough.
Why do you think that when people like Andy McCarthy say that there’s nothing to be done about it except impeachment, there aren’t lots of people saying that we should pass an Amendment? I mean, it’s obvious that that would work if we could do it.
This is exactly what he anticipated. There was strong debate over this and he almost didn’t sign on to the constitution. The Constitution works just fine as long as it’s applied. I don’t see much evidence of that in recent times. Obamacare isn’t constitutional. Neither is illegal immigration, or chain immigration that was decided in the courts. Federally funded abortion, the EPA and all of these massive departments that make laws outside of congress are not constitutional JoE. Congress cannot legislate it’s own power away under the constitution. I’d say the constitution looks more like Swiss cheese than a document.
Article V makes getting stuff through the convention easier than getting it through the Senate. That’s not a very complex concept. It sounds like you’re trying to make it complex by claiming, wrongly, that we can alter the constitution by attaching a note to the convention, but since we can’t alter the constitution without passing an Amendment, that doesn’t make it more complex because it isn’t true.
Is your argument that George Mason foresaw that there might come a time when people wouldn’t respect the Constitution, so he created a way to amend it?
I think that that is not what George Mason had in mind. I’m not even sure what Amendments you’re proposing here. What Amendment proposed by a political group, for instance, would make Obamacare Unconstitutional?
With the EPA it sounds like you want an amendment to strengthen the non-delegation doctrine. Is that what you’re wanting? Do you have examples of state constitutions where an Amendment similar to that has worked?
Yes, frankly.
No. that’s not what I meant. Mason feared the government would become unmoored from the constitution and would take over the people, and force things like funded abortion and Obamacare down our throats.
The amendments that are being discussed right now in legislatures have to do with a balanced budget amendment. I’m not sure of any others, but I have a few ideas.
I think our signals have gotten crossed James. I recommend reading The Liberty Amendments, by Mark Levin. I think you might see things differently about this process after reading it.
I’m a strong supporter of an Article V convention — I make the case for it in my book on the Constitution. Remember that any amendment proposed by such a convention would have to be ratified by the legislatures of 3/4 of the states, so I have no fear of a “runaway” convention engineering a coup.
In my view a convention is the only realistic way to achieve structural change. Congress, the Courts, and the Bureaucracy can tinker around the edges, and are always willing to come up with new entitlements but they cannot be trusted to do anything meaningful to arrest government growth. A popularly elected convention might well propose a Balanced Budget (or spending cap) amendment and/or term limits amendment, both of which are quite popular with voters. If we could get either of those ratified by the states, it would be extremely useful in reining in the federal government’s hyper-activism.
This isn’t some magical thing. You just need to elect people (including presidents) who actually want to limit and roll back government.
People don’t want to do it. Consider that the Republican front runner, Scott Walker, when presented with a chance to do that in the form of ending ethanol mandates, declined to do so for reasons of political expediency. And people here gave him a pass for it.
Whatever Mason thought, Madison and Hamilton didn’t agree. They disliked direct democracy in Federalist 50, which is why the conventions and such have to go through state legislatures. But if the government isn’t working, can such an amendment work? They pointed to the Board of Censors in Pennsylvania, whose purpose was to see if the state constitution had been violated, and take corrective action.
It was an abysmal failure.
And looking at state level conventions and constitutions, there isn’t much success there, either. State legislatures are very good at finding their way around constitutional amendments -California finding ways around Prop 13 being the most famous.
And that’s in the rare case that the convention doesn’t itself get subverted.
Excellent point. If such amendments, (and we haven’t discussed what that amendment, or amendments would be), will have no choice but to work. The logic behind the amendment process is to return the power to the states. So if an amendment was passed to return power to the states, it would be the federal government that would have to plead it’s case to the states. Not the other way around. If the federal government refused to comply, they could be ignored.
You are right about a poor success record. I think it’s been tried a handful of times, but as George Savage pointed out that when it looked like the process might actually succeed, Congress took action to correct the problem.
You partly don’t get the response you expect because you keep framing the charge inaccurately and it appears you believe your words. Walker said he wanted to phase them out, but not overnight. Wanting to have them in place for the long term might be a matter of political expediency, but the rate at which you pull the rug out from under the industry that has grown up around subsidies is a question that reasonable libertarians can disagree about. You want to give businesses that can survive a moderate transition to independence the chance to do so; needless bankruptcies are a dead-weight loss to the economy.
I’m pretty confident that none of the 11 Amendments would protect us from Obamacare. I also suspect that most of the EPA regulations would survive, although I forget the procedure for regulatory review. .
Right…
And in the 1960 presidential debates both Nixon and Kennedy wanted to phase out agricultural subsidies gradually for the same reason.
Call me cynical, but I expect the ethanol mandates to last well past their expiration point.
Maybe a President Walker would put the final nail in the coffin of ethanol mandates. Maybe going to Iowa and supporting an ethanol mandate in front of a crowd of corn growers who will vote in the first presidential contest of the cycle was an act of prudent public policy and not calculated political pandering. Maybe I’m wrong.
But based on the evidence I have now, it doesn’t look like it
My larger point, that people actually do want larger government, even the allegedly small-government party, remains.
There’s no panacea. There’s no magical cure. There’s no deus ex machina that will come from a convention of states. Politicians react to what the public wants. And the public wants free [um, stuff] on somebody else’s (read: MY) dime.
I think you might want to read a little closer. In his book the states have the right to vote down any Supreme Court decision and or Congressional act with a super majority. Much like congress to override a veto. Also the EPA would be out of business. That’s not to say that environmental concerns wouldn’t be regulated at the state level, but……………
It’s fair to express doubt about Walker’s commitment to ending them. It’s not fair to say that he supports them or declines to end them.
As with all campaign promises, maybe he won’t be able to follow through, but the fact that Politico and Reason tell us to be cynical about this particular promise because it fits their preferred narrative isn’t a good basis for being cynical. It’s particularly unhelpful to push him to clarify at this point; if you want a positive outcome and you think he’s being cynical, he should be pushed to clarify in January 2016 or later.
He didn’t support an ethanol mandate in front of a crowd of corn growers. He supported a gradual phasing out of an ethanol mandate in front of a crowd of corn growers.
What evidence is that?
Well, yes, obviously the LP is filled with big government types, but the GOP nominates people who have cut the size of government, and the chief reason that government is smaller today than it was at any point during Reagan’s first term is that Bush 41 cut it dramatically, just like Harding did with Wilson’s hike and Ike and Nixon with FDR’s (to be fair, JFK, too). Bush’s second term was also pretty helpful (it looks bad on the charts because of TARP, but most of that “spending” was short term loans that were quickly repaid).
If politicians only ever increased spending, we’d not be spending a smaller portion of our money on government now than we were then. You can make it look like they’re increasing spending by having your charts labelled in terms of nominal dollars, but that tells you, for instance, that America has a bigger horse stabling industry now than at the point of America’s founding; literally everything appears to grow if you choose a dumb enough metric, no matter how much it is cut.
That is always the answer, and it hasn’t worked yet. Not even under our beloved Reagan. He was for a convention of the states to amend the constitution. So was Eisenhower and Milton Friedman.
A good model for this would be the mid 90’s welfare reform. Millions were not simply cut off of welfare overnight. Rather they were given an end date for benefits and requirements were made for them to continue receiving benefits.
It would work for corporate welfare as well.
I’m late to the thread, but wanted to say when I had taxes done, I asked our accountant how things “were going” – he shook his head – he even recommended the Mark Levin book The Liberty Amendments! He said the new changes & regulations, tracking everyone via tax filings, he had to ask me if I had health insurance and with who? He said the questions and changes are very invasive. My husband just changed jobs so we lost company insurance and are in middle of transitioning to finding some! Sticker shock – premiums have tripled!! My sister in law, a home health care nurse, went from the “gold” plan to the bronze, could not afford the new amount. Don’t qualify for tax breaks if you are average income. My sister said in Maryland, hospitals are closing, doctors dropping out, I hear the same on radio – they cannot keep up with the forced regulations and costs.
Then I read the story on Ricochet about Hillary: http://ricochet.com/hillarys-day-of-wrath/. The Clintons are scary – free people are up against great odds – a crossroads. I am finishing your Thatcher book – and into Menace in Europe – “Menace in the US” may be your next bestseller – so much to learn-write it before the next election – sigh.
The 5th Amendment is interesting – so much has changed Claire in a short time – not good. Again, an idea needs follow-thru – this forum offers ideas – action is needed – God help and save the Republic!
I just read every comment. And, I’m deeply disappointed in the naysayers’ ability to articulate a coherent argument; amidst all their adamant opposition.
Too many factual errors.
Too many misapplied logical processes.
We are in need of some method (short of violence) to restrain a government which cannot be expected to restrain itself. Article Five is that method.
Unconstitutional thinking got us into this mess. Constitutional thinking is the way out.
Perfect!
If we’re not coherently rebutting anything, it’s partly because it’s not clear what we’re rebutting.
In terms of stating example concerns, I think that “If we have a convention, a Citizens United Amendment is likely to be produced; this would be excellent for Democrats politically and, worse, could conceivably pass” is coherent. The objections to it are that it could pass now through Congress, which is clearly false, and that we can pre-emptively limit the scope of the convention, which is also false.
For the rebuttal, though, there’s a lot of different claims being made and they’re too diverse to rebut in one group.
Some people think that Obamacare can be repealed through an Amendment. It wouldn’t be repealed by any of the Levin Amendments, and no one has offered another.
Some people think the debt is the problem. Some don’t.
Some people believe in term limits as an important change. Some don’t.
Some people don’t appear to have any clear amendment in mind, just an idea that changing something would be good.
James, my friend, my compatriot (is that a word?), my brother from another mother, …….read the damn book. Please? I’ll buy it for you if you promise to read it.
Cal, my compatriot and friend, I’ve heard Levin talking about it, I’m on the Convention of States mailing list, and I’ve talked to some of their activists at some length on multiple occasions. I think that some of the Liberty Amendments would be positive for the country (2, 3 and 6, fwiw), and most of them are old ideas that I learned about in law school.
Some are eccentric; requiring photo ID, for instance, is a very specific technology…
Okay, hang it, I’m getting the darn book. I’ll read it tomorrow.
You’re the man James. God bless you.
You don’t even know. If he actually likes it, he’ll start mailing copies of it to people.